Can Camtasia Edit Vine Videos? Poor Performance When Trying.

Hello
Community, this is my first post so if I am doing anything wrong please let me
know.

Over the Christmas period, it occurred to me that
in order to attract a larger following on YouTube, my content would need to be
strategic and more professionally edited (yes, it took me that long.) I decided to respond to this
sudden occurrence by opening a new channel under a different name with a
pre-determined and publicly-visible video schedule. I got to work on the
aesthetics, such as my channel art, avatar and then my description box. After
all this was done, I downloaded an intro and outro template, edited them to my
liking, then rendered and saved them. Lastly my channel's Twitter account was
opened. Now all that was needed was something to show for all of my efforts - an actual video.

I thought for a moment. 'What's trending on the
interwebs right now that could earn me a significant amount of fans?' This
was the most important part of my channel's opening and so I set about doing
some very serious research. After concluding the research, I decided
upon making a vine compilation. My first video was to have 205 vines in it, a
length of around 20 minutes, as most compilations are around this length. and I
planned to release it by January 4th, which was a Monday, tying in nicely with
my schedule. As the days and weeks went past, the ideas grew, as did my
excitement. For ONCE, I thought, after five years of obscurity, I was going to
be recognised!Fast-forward to Monday, January 4th 2016. The New
Year had been ushered in. The toils of 2015 were no more. This was my
year, I told myself. 2016 will
be a year to remember!I hastily dashed to my computer, and, after
logging on, cracked on with the process of skimming through all the vines under
the tag #newyear. They were handpicked on a judgemental basis, with the
criteria being audio and visual quality, as well as overall comicality. Once a
long hour of watching, re-watching, pausing, volume level adjusting and
downloading had come to a conclusion, I was faced with the task of assembling
and editing the clips so that they played together as a compilation.Now I will be the first to admit that I may have
overestimated my ability to work efficiently, as a person with my curious
personality will find themselves constantly fighting a losing battle against
distractions, both mental and physical, both of which have a negative impact on
the speed of execution and progress made. In addition, unfortunately, I other
preoccupations that took the position of top priority away from my video,
preventing me from carrying out any work on it at all for a few hours. That said,
I can only allot so much blame to myself; it is the Camtasia Studio programme
that is, in my opinion, the major issue here.What the heck am I talking about?Well, you see, at the start of the day, I was
euphoric, with the bounds of my body not being able to contain my emotion. I
was, literally figuratively, bursting at the seams. I had been looking forward to
this day since the festive season began, and I nothing, at least, at that
moment and to the best of my knowledge (which as you will see has its limitations)
could put a stop the joy I had. By the end of it, I was emotionally battered,
my soul drowning in an endless icy pool of sorrow. The best day of my life
quickly switched poles and became the worst, and despite the fact that every
day is a day anew, and the fact that there were still 362 of these 24-hour
periods left, I lost all hope for the future. Why, you may ask?Well, for the first hour or so, I didn't notice
any trouble. I simply imported the video clips into Camtasia Studio, added them
to my timeline, annotated, then cropped if necessarily, before repeating the
same cycle with another clip. The objective of this mission was clear: have 205
vines all edited to perfection and the entire video uploaded onto my new
channel by the end of the day.Contrary to my belief, however, Camtasia had other
ideas.I was around 70 minutes into my project when the
troubles began. Camtasia Studio started acting very strangely. I was
astonished, stupefied, shocked, puzzled, bewildered, confused, bemused,
perplexed, confuddled, confuzzled (and I know that's not a word) and simply
dumbfounded. It crashed.Yes! The project I was working on for so long crashed on me, just as I was getting to the
next vine.

To say that I was a little bit cross would be more
than a mere understatement, but a LIE in
its own right. I was very annoyed at the fact that the software I trusted would
play up like this, especially on such an important day. Nevertheless I shrugged
it off, dismissing it as a 'once in a blue moon' type of event which would not
repeat itself if I simply continued doing what I was doing. Needless to say I
was horribly wrong, as the software started crashing more frequently. When I
imported a new file, when I added its corresponding caption, when I tried altering
a clip's length. Constant freezing and stoppages of response gradually wore
away my remaining time like sandpaper eroding wood. Eventually I realised that
I would have to settle for less (something I find absolutely detestable) and
end the production at just 85 or so vines leaving a large percentage of the
material I spent ages downloading WASTED.

Dear Community, this wasn't the close of the
troubles, as Camtasia resented the fact that I was about to save the production
I'd spent so long planning for, and even opposed the idea. Initially, wanting
it to be uploaded straight to my new channel once rendering was completed, I
elected to publish the video to YouTube automatically. However, it now appears
to be the case that the editing studio is crashing even when I attempt to
produce the video. I've tried simply saving it rather than publishing to
YouTube, I've tried reinstalling and changing the priority of the programme to
'Above Normal', to no avail.

In short, nothing has worked.

The thing is, why?

Why does Camtasia insist on crashing? The video is
only 8 minutes 42 seconds long after all. I've made longer ones.

TL; DR: I've just opened a new YouTube channel and
have made my first video. When I try to produce it so it's ready to be
uploaded, Camtasia Studio ceases to respond. Nothing thus far has worked.
Insofar as emotions are concerned, I'm feeling drained to say the least. I feel
as if I've sweated for nothing.

My specs are up to scratch, right? I mean, Intel
Core i5 is more than decent, and the decent clock speed should be more than
able to handle a video. Besides, the dedicated graphics card doesn't seem like
it's lacking at all, despite being at the lower end of the GTX scale. I know
there are better ones like the GTX 750 and 760, but come on - isn't this good
enough?

I have about 1.8 TB of free space out of a total 2
TB. That's 90%. Please don't tell me to make more room; the entire project is a
mere 1.13 MB. It's pathetic.

As for the OS, I'm certain that Camtasia is
compatible with it, as I've saved projects on it before with no hassle. Why is
it now acting up?

Any help would be MUCH appreciated. It's
disgraceful that a higher-end system can't cope with a 1 MB file.

~TheDeepEnd

Images

You see that? 1.1%, and then it throws in the
towel again. I'm running out of towels, and not because I'm crying buckets.

This is my CPU, memory and disk usage before my
project is opened. Note the 4% processor utilisation and the low input of Camtasia. Something I have noted though is that I'm running 32-bit versions of Camtasia and Chorme. Could that be the issue, that they are not optimised to run on my 64-bit system?

Awesome story. You should write a book. How long did that take to write?

Anyway, Camtasia can't handle long projects. I'm a YouTuber (Scrima Games & Scrima Talks) and been using it for a year. You would have to break it down into small projects. Produce the small projects, and then stich them together by importing them. It sucks, I know, and they need to make a 64-bit version of whatever version can actually handle more memory. Each action you do and the longer Camtasia is open, results in Camtasias memory being used to its LIMIT. Yes, it has a limit, almost like a timer. Extremely annoying, I know. Not sure why it's taking them so long to develop one that can actually not crash from long projects.

again, it sounds like you still have too many separate clips on timeline [i.e., in play]; splitting the original project in half and still having issues suggests that there are still too many on timeline, and/or there is a corruption in the project

you might be better off starting over, and work with 1 vine clip at a time?

or, try to locate a corruption using techniques described in this tutorial ...

There could be a number of potential causes for this particular project, from troublesome source files to a problematic/corrupt project. One thing I'd like you to test is taking a screen recording using Camtasia, make a few edits, then try to produce to YouTube; does the test project work?

Given that the issue is likely very specific to your particular project/computer/instance of Camtasia, can I have you open a support ticket at http://bit.ly/1DYL3yF and put ATTN Robert in the Subject? That way I can look into the issue, which will require the transferring of files (something not possible here in the forums).

Camtasia is NOT cursed. I edited, rendered and released 100+ video clips over the past few months on YouTube all made with Camtasia 8.

While you constructively list your system specs (thank you), I do not see what FILE TYPE the Vine clips are in and I refuse to read all that verbose dramatic prose. #brevity

Other sources indicate these are some type of mp4 (already compressed) file. These are probably some variant with properties (VBR variable bit rate?) that challenge video editors. Why don't you try a smaller project with a few of these files?

Well clearly, from what you have posted, Camtasia is not cursed for your system (lucky). However, in case you have failed to notice, this post refers to a problem that seems to be affecting me, since the fact that I was encountering this issue is the reason why the post was made in the first place. I did not intend to make generalisations. The title was written from my perspective.

Why wouldn't you want to ready all that verbose dramatic prose? I spent ages writing it...

The file type is indeed MP4, however I have worked with these files before and not encountered such problems, so that cannot explain why Camtasia persistently crashes when I try to edit one of the clips. Mr. Scrima has suggested that I create a number of smaller projects and then bring them together, which is inconvenient but appears to be the only workaround (and I don't want to have to 'work around' things.)

Lastly I don't see why I shouldn't expect a system of this nature to handle an 8-minute, 1 MB file. It would be rather odd to not expect such a thing. It's not like the file is huge or anything, it's actually very small in size and the fact that I can't even save it as a video really confuses me.

I haven't helped you yet because there isn't enough to go on. Despite all this text we don't really have much detail on your process.

It's not so much the running time; it's more about asking the editor to keep track of 207 clips plus whatever you add to them in terms of transitions and such? If the task was simply laying 207 clips on the timeline and rendering that sounds like a 30 min job. Concentrate on that and other forum members might chime in with something useful for your application.

I did not mean to say that you were unhelpful, "Timbre4", I apologise if the incorrect meaning was conveyed.

207 clips have not been added to the Library. Only 102 were actually included, and very few transitions have actually been added; if they were, this was only towards the end. As I said before the total file size only amounted to 1.13 MB.

This is NOT about the file size; please re-read the post by Kayakman below about the project file writing and updating an XML file to keep track of all the clips and events on the timeline. Vine clips may be "mp4" but there must be something odd under the hood.

I don't know what a Vine clip is, but I'll try and offer some guidance ...

Both Timbre4 and Kevin are correct in what they say

From what you describe re your project, you are carrying too many objects on the timeline at one time. The project file is an XML file; each timeline object [including any edits] become items in the XML file; they all have to be parsed after every edit action. Too many objects will bog down editor performance, and cause the type of issues you are seeing.

Breaking the project into much smaller chunks is the way to go; use the Library to easily manage this.

The file size is small because it's just a text file referencing all of the Vine .mp4s. It's taxing to the system because it is trying to pull together a couple hundred files on the fly, to do the previewing/production.

One other thing, though: In the past, we've seen Camtasia crashing early in the production process due to a problem with one of the source files. Since your project seems to be hiccuping very early (1.1%), you might try removing the first 10-15 Vines or so from the timeline and then producing again. I know that this would make for a bad video, but if production works at that point, we would know that it's one of the source files that is causing the grief.

Tech Support may have already walked you through this. Sorry I missed this post until just now. I really hope you can get this worked out.

I've already tried something similar. I removed half of the video and tried re-producing it, and from there, it started breaking up earlier. Even with the eight minute video, before it would crash at intervals between 20 and 25%. Now it's crashing before 2%. I find this absurd, and it has not helped me to overcome the problem I've faced for a week.

Hello,I am still not sure of your process and I am not sure what the Vine clips are (file format) or where they came from (how did you come by them?), but, if you are doing any cutting/deleting/copying of those clips, this information might be valuable to you. I have copied this from another post in this forum.

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Overall, if you are making a lot of edits, you can experience serious performance issues. This is because we use a non-destructive method of editing. So, when you make a cut, or a split, or delete a section, your original clip is not being changed in any way - only what you see changes. To accommodate this process, we make copies of your entire clip and place it on the timeline.

To better explain, let's use this example:

If you have a 1 hour high motion video on the timeline and you cut a small section out of the beginning like this:

You have not really cut the video - we have just "hidden" the part you cut or removed. But, in doing this process, you now have 2 hours of video on the timeline since we make a copy of the entire video clip for each split, cut, or delete you create.

So, after 8 cuts, splits, and deletes, this is what you have:

You can test this out for yourself - just make a cut or two on a video clip. Then, drag the end out of one of the clips - you will see you can drag the entire video out from that one edited clip.

Note: Camtasia Studio has ALWAYS worked this way. We have never, ever, had a destructive process in place for editing on the timeline.

So, for this reason, many people will select a clip they have edited down to say 15 seconds, and produce that clip and bring it back in as an MP4 file then delete the original edited clip on the timeline.

When doing that, they have a true 15 second clip on the timeline and have removed the edited one hour clip.

You can see how this would greatly impact the performance on the timeline and subsequently what you see in the Preview Window.

I hope this helps or gives you a tip or two on how performance is impacted by certain editing on the timeline.

So your editing method is causing performance issues? If so, why not go for the destructive method? It may seem less desirable but if it offers higher performance and more stability then it will most likely be welcome at my house.

Hi Deep End.Very entertaining prose - reminds me of a few letters I have written in the past. Loved it. I have also had the same issues and have given up on creating large or long videos. I am now waiting for a 64bit edition of Camtasia. (and eyeing off Premiere Pro in the meantime in case the 64 bit edition never comes).

We want to thank you for your patience while we worked to address this issue and we are pleased to announce that we have just released our newest, most powerful version of Camtasia yet. This Camtasia release is now 64-bit and should help on addressing the large project issues you have seen. However, you'd need to have a 64-bit OS to install the latest release. The full system requirements can be found here. You can buy/upgrade Camtasia here or download the trial here.